MiniMax ships across text (the M-series), speech, and Hailuo video models, with several open-weights drops along the way. ThursdAI — the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — has covered 16 MiniMax releases since Mar 2025, most recently MiniMax M3.1 Flash on Oct 22, 2026. Highlights include MiniMax M2.7, MiniMax H3 open weights, MiniMax M-2.5, MiniMax Speech 2.6. 7 of them shipped with open weights. Every entry below has the episode segment where we covered it live, plus primary-source links and key numbers where we have them.
MiniMax reveals Space Bunny as M3.1 Flash at $0.15 / $0.60 per 1M tokens
The anonymous Space Bunny model was MiniMax M3.1 Flash, priced at $0.15 input and $0.60 output per million tokens, with weights due October 23.
MiniMax Music 3 lands with open weights (and a rough license)
MiniMax Music 3 landed right after last week's show with open weights and, per Wolfram, possibly the worst license of the year — excluding the US, Europe and the UK. Nobody cares: it's third on Hugging Face trending and the ComfyUI crowd already has it running locally.
MiniMax-Music3: open-weights production music model
MiniMax released Music3, an open-weights production music model. It dropped in the middle of the live show as one of the week's three breaking news items.
MiniMax opens H3's weights, and the community ships LoRAs and Apple Silicon in 48 hours
H3 (Hailuo 3.0), a 33B omni-modal transformer generating up to 15 seconds at 2K with native stereo audio from unified text/image/video/audio context, landed on Hugging Face days after its announcement, per Victor Su Ortiz the first open-weight state-of-the-art omni video model. Within 48 hours the community shipped LoRA support and Apple Silicon inference, neither of which MiniMax optimized for, and X filled with recreated episodes of The Office. The panel also dug into the community license's litigation-linked restrictions on US use, the gap between downloadable and cleared.
MiniMax announces M3 coding/agentic model with 1M context
MiniMax announced M3, a natively multimodal coding and agentic model with a one-million-token sparse attention context claim and open weights promised soon. Reported numbers include 59 on SWE-bench Pro, and the panel noted MiniMax already has a following for cheap agentic tool calling even as pure coding quality is debated.
MiniMax 2.7 open-source weights discussed as small-model momentum continues
The panel covered MiniMax 2.7 and its open-weights release in the context of small, efficient models becoming genuinely practical for local and specialized agent workflows. The segment focused on capability momentum and how open-weights expectations keep shaping adoption sentiment.
MiniMax M2.7: first self-evolving model hits 56% on SWE-Bench Pro
MiniMax dropped M2.7, billed as the first self-evolving model: it ran 100+ autonomous RL optimization loops and wrote its own agent scaffolding, built by one engineer over four days with zero lines of human code. It scores 56.22% on SWE-Bench Pro, within one point of Opus 4.6's 57.3%, and WolfBench shows it roughly matching Sonnet 4.6 on OpenClaw agent tasks. Not yet open weights, though rumors suggest a release is coming.
MiniMax M-2.5 hits 80.2% SWE-Bench Verified with 10B active params
MiniMax dropped M-2.5 thirty minutes before the show: a 200B-total, 10B-active open-weights model scoring 80.2% on SWE-Bench Verified, approaching Opus 4.6 at roughly 1/20th the cost (~15 cents per task with a 57% win rate over Opus). Trained with MiniMax's decoupled Forge RL framework and optimized for end-to-end task time with fewer tool calls and thinking tokens. Senior researcher Olive Song joined live and revealed the model was still training — they cut a checkpoint for early release.
MiniMax drops Hailuo 2.3 in November
MiniMax released Hailuo 2.3 (referred to as 'Hailuo LLM 2.3' on the show) in November, cited as another strong release from the Chinese labs. It closed out a year in which MiniMax shipped everything from 4M-context LLMs to media models.
MiniMax-01: open model with a 4M token context window
MiniMax (Hailuo) released MiniMax-01 in January with a 4 million token context window, by far the largest context of any open-weights model at the time. It was an early sign of the Chinese-lab open source dominance that defined 2025.
Hailuo 2.3: MiniMax's cinema-grade video generation model
MiniMax's Hailuo team released version 2.3 of its video generation model, pitching cinema-grade output quality. It landed in the same week as MiniMax M2 and Speech 2.6, underlining how broadly MiniMax is shipping across text, voice, and video.
MiniMax M2: open-source agentic model at 8% of Claude's price, 2x speed
MiniMax released M2, an open-source agentic model positioned at roughly 8% of Claude's price while running about twice as fast. Head of Engineering Skyler Miao joined the show for a deep dive, framing M2 as both a model story and a speed story, and the panel read it as part of a broader open-model pressure wave on frontier labs.
MiniMax Speech 2.6: ultra-human voice AI with sub-250ms latency
MiniMax released Speech 2.6, a voice model targeting ultra-human quality with end-to-end latency under 250ms, available through the MiniMax platform API. It slots into the episode's voice arms race alongside Cartesia's Sonic 3.
MiniMax Speech tech report published, called the best TTS out there
MiniMax (Hailuo) published the technical report for MiniMax Speech, its text-to-speech system, which the show described as the best TTS out there. The report details the architecture behind the system on arXiv.
Hailuo Speech-02 TTS API: potentially SOTA emotional voice cloning
Hailuo (MiniMax) released the Speech-02 TTS API, which Alex called potentially state of the art for emotional control and voice cloning quality. It produces nuanced, realistic synthetic voices and was the standout voice release of the week.
MiniMax launches Image-01 text-to-image model at 1/10 the cost
MiniMax released Image-01, a versatile text-to-image model the company positions at roughly one tenth the cost of competing image generation offerings. It is available through MiniMax's hosted platform.
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